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I've been reading up on 5G for a few weeks right now, and feel like I really need to start sharing some of this. If you want a more reference-heavy text-based summary of the dangers you can get the big picture here.

It feels like humanity's nearing a breaking point. Either we wake up, or it's over. I'd hope for a total social, technological and environmental collapse over a mindless big-brother dystopia where we live our lives like zombies though, constantly bombarded with frequencies that slowly wear us down and strain us; make us slaves to a system that some people, for some reason, believe can be to their benefit. To our benefit?

The movie above's definitely a bit overly dramatic, as is the title (I changed the case as to not give a bad first impression) and messily arranged, probably hastily - with the intention of getting this out to the masses as fast as possible, but hopefully you see the bigger picture. Take from it what you will. Look around. Take part in the information you come across and build your own opinion. The worst you can be is unaware.

Personally I've probably never been so afraid, and so against anything as much as this in my entire life. It's getting hard to focus on peripheral tasks. We need to wake up. We need to find a better way. Technology has been evolving so rapidly it seems like we've lost control over it; it's no longer evolving to our benefit, but taking us far, far away from our original ideals; visions for humankind.

Is an augmented reality, where humans pay tribute to a corporate regime that benefits off of our suffering, all the while corporations race to replace us with machines, increase productivity and effectivize big data to control our consumption habits really the future we strive for? One where nature's sacrificed in the want for connectivity, and social media becomes the only thing that feeds us the dopamine we need to keep going, in a world that's teetering on the edge of both economic and environmental collapse; where warfare has become invisible, and commercial rather than idealistic, and regimes are technically able to enforce their propaganda by quelling all opposition with silent radiation?

If all of this sounds like sci-fi, then question why. What benefits will the technology we are currently building allow us, and do those really outweigh the potential mis-use? Is this the kind of world that you want to live in? I'm starting to understand why Elon Musk doesn't seem adverse to actually moving to Mars himself, if that means escaping this otherwise inescapable potential global tyranny, and at the least: highly radiated, mindless, devoid of all but the strongest lifeforms future dystopia.

I get carried away, but even if you believe only in the lesser dangers surely even those are far too great to allow? I'll be getting an EMF meter soon and I swear I am never getting a 5G phone. Not unless the risks of this particular technology are drastically reduced. But the more I read the more I feel it'd be better if we just backtrack to our roots. This future? It just does not compute.

There's an appeal against all of this here, with a great deal of organizations and researchers backing it too. Give it a look if you like. And expect a bit more on this topic later on... it's finna become my calling.

Just watched what's definitely a new favorite among the impressive repertoire of NPR Tiny Desk concerts. And it all ended with this:

At some point in the future they are going to try and label us a political rap group, and that we are not, we do not care what political party you belong to, we don't care who you supported, we don't care what you are doing tomorrow politically, we care that socially every one of you know; you are absolutely born free and nothing has a right to interrupt that freedom. We love you.

Alright, so as part three in today's unfortunatetech trilogy, I'd like to tell you the story of the R4 DS cartridge I've been testing, that this week came across with some unfortunate data corruption.

The R4 is one of many flash carts for the DS, basically a DS cartridge with a slot for an SD card, to be used with content of your choosing. It loads like any other game, but once it's loaded you can load pretty much anything else on it, from apps to games to just any type of file you'd like to view or play. Music, movies, pictures, documents... the hardware's the limit.

Just so you know there's plenty of legal homebrew stuff you can run on these things, even if the most common use is definitely ROMs. I did this last year, for example.

There's something for everything. Both games and apps. You can basically turn your DS into a whole, fully functional, miniature little OS - though be careful about what apps you install as it's definitely possible some of them can corrupt certain data. Or overwrite certain data. Or in all possible ways mess things up - it's not official software after all.

I've been trying this one recently, and since everything was working fine until I did it's not impossible that one was the culprit...

It all started with a corrupted file.

I occasionally plug in the SD card to the computer to make a backup, and do this by simply dragging over the folder from the SD card to a local drive, but recently one arbitrary file just wouldn't move. Corruption, apparently.

It seemed to have no effect on the file system itself, though, so it seemed strange I couldn't move it to another one, corrupt or no. But alright, there wasn't much I could do about that so I let it be, and then one day I booted the DS cart and: it wouldn't run. At all.

I plugged the SD into my computer and it showed up as completely unformatted.

So that was that, I reformatted the drive, ran Recuva to potentially salvage some of the files (deep scan) and it basically recovered a bunch of icons and wallpapers. Good thing I had a backup right?

Doing error checks on the SD card now shows no errors, so I'm not sure as to what caused this issue, but it's possible it has to do with this (same link as above), and more specifically the file operations feature of ditto.

I'll be testing the cart without it from now on to see if corruption occurs without it, and if it does I'm hoping to run a check before it becomes unusable again. It's a quality SD card, and a relatively new one too, so that shouldn't be the issue.

Moral of the story: Not sure. Test your stuff. Figure things out. Solve your problems. And cumulatively, deriving some wisdom from all of these recent three incidents: don't spend too much time on unnecessary tasks or you might find that you give yourself problems you don't even really need.

I just accidentally deleted a 1,5 TB chunk of files I'd been moving from a bunch of smaller/older drives onto one larger one, and late night decided to clone onto another drive the same size. For posterity.

I can't say for certain if I somehow accidentally put the drives in the wrong slots, copying the empty drive to the source drive, or if something just went horrible wrong with the cloning process... but whatever happened it definitely went horribly wrong! Opening up the drives today I'm greeted with two identical, and EMPTY drives! Identical drive signatures (that's easy to fix though - just go through disk management and hit the 'offline' notice to fix it - hopefully this wasn't the fix that somehow started this nightmare) aaand identically barren wasteland. Nothing there. Zilch. Nada. Stereotypical synonyms on nothing end burst.

This comes at the end of a few weeks spent backing up files, just in case, and has me realizing two things. Firstly: If you decide to clone a drive, it's best to have a backup of that drive somewhere safe already, because the clone process might in fact impact BOTH drives - not just the additional one. And secondly: I don't really need this particular chunk of data.

It still stings though. I'm running a shallow Recuva scan on one of the drives I copied files FROM - to which I've unfortunately copied new files to after, and running a deep scan on the now empty source drive, hoping that everything will still miraculously be there, just hidden away by the new partition index.

A shallow scan didn't work though. It recovered files that had been previously deleted on the OTHER drive, which had been cloned to this one, so I'm not certain this attempt will do much good either. It's currently running on two hours, with three more to go, so it's still a while left until I find out. Fingers crossed. UPD: Didn't work. Fingers uncrossed.

But it makes you think a bit. About files. About what files you really need. About if all this time you spend copying files to/from and between locations is really worth it... also knowing that a fire or similar freak occurrence could easily wipe away the entirety of these files regardless. Backups or no.

I need to get some backups to a different location, but cloud backup's expensive for large amounts of data, and I don't have that great bandwidth either way. Leaving a copy with a friend is an idea but I'm paranoid by nature, so I'm currently reading up on encryption too. Not that I don't trust my friends, I just don't trust my friends to be paranoid by nature.

So for now I'm backing up locally, and backing up certain selections of smaller files online, and pondering additional backup strategies. Also currently thinking about all that time. All that drive, poured into these drives; so easily dead; so messily revived. Just like my bike.

Not that I ever could revive my bike. Not without a little more alchemy practice. Alchemy drive recovery? Hmm! Unconventional anime spin-off ideas...